Page 16 of Guarding My Love

The pup started to squirm when he handed him off and Charlotte reached out to snag him. If it were a baby, he’d bet there would be wails in the room.

He didn’t remember anyone ever wanting to be with him more than someone else.

Most times they were trying to get away from him and his moodiness.

“Thanks again,” she said. “I’ll get to the cookies today or tomorrow and just leave them in your mailbox. I’m assuming you check it daily?”

“I do,” he said. “When I come home at the end of the day.”

His mailbox was at the top of his driveway.

“Have a good day at work, Foster.”

“You too,” he said, leaving out the back door and climbing in his SUV and pulling away.

He had a ten-minute drive to his office and turned the music up as soon as he cleared his driveway.

He never blared it too much when he was close to the houses, trying to be considerate. He knew it was loud enough to be heard through the windows at times, but it was early and he didn’t want to be the dick that woke people up.

He parked in the Vice President's spot, climbed out and swiped his card for the door to unlock, then put another code in after that. When he got to the door past the main lobby, he had to enter another one. Each level of the building required more access codes to get to floors. Signing into computers much more than that.

West owned or had a lot of shares in companies all over the world.

Data and servers were kept and run here in Merrick.

Staff were assigned to different businesses, but no one but him and two others could access every single server.

Even then, there were things only he had access to. Like information on the server in the corporate offices.

He went to his office and set his laptop down. He didn’t really need to bring it back and forth, as he had enough equipment, but he got used to doing this since it was easier to sign into everything from this machine.

His email box was lit up with unread messages like it always was every morning. Unlike his brothers, he tried not to read email all night long and rather had code to give him an alarm if it was from specific people or had certain keywords in it.

When his phone rang at seven-thirty, he reached over to see it was Laken calling.

“Morning,” he said.

“Don’t you sound chipper,” his sister said. “Normally you answer my calls by saying ‘Yeah’.”

“Not always,” he said.

“That’s true. You must be in the office where you’ve got your happy face on.”

He snorted. He always played nice when he was at work. Or at least tried to.

It was his happy place, but he also knew he’d never do anything to embarrass his brother West who worked his ass off to give the family everything they had now.

Did Foster work his ass off to be where he was? Hell yeah. Just like a lot of his other siblings.

And he didn’t complain about it either, but he felt at times he had more responsibility on his shoulders dealing with everything behind the scenes to get businesses up and running and staying that way.

“What is it I can help you with?” he asked.

“Now you’re just being cute,” Laken said. “Did you take some magic personality pills today? Play with kittens or puppies? Watch some funny baby videos?”

He frowned. Was it Marco that put him in this mood?

Nah. That’s stupid.

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